A newly published VMware KB1024051 article now states that “VMware does not support third party clustering products.”

This means that Microsoft Clustering Service or Veritas Cluster Services are not supported for vCenter 4.x.

Please take this into account when designing mission-critical vCenter deployments. These customers should be looking at VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat with VMware HA instead of third-party clustering products.

VMware updated a KB today on how to monitor snapshot deletion. This is especially useful for large snapshots that “time out” for vCenter because they take more than 5-10 minutes to complete. I have been using this exact procedure for years and never thought to blog it…for some insane reason.

Basically, use the watch command on the *.vmdk files in the VM datastore. You can use -n to set a refresh interval and -d to show the change in size between refreshes. However, the most important information is what base .vmdk file is being written to and when. This touch timestamp will give you more information on which disk is in progress, which has not yet started, and what is already done.

*NOTICE* As of July 16, 2010 – VMware KB1024051 – has been published stating that “VMware does not support third party clustering products.” The instructions below should not be used for any production or supported environment.

VIOPS has a good document on how to cluster the vCenter services on MSCS. Things have changed slightly from 2.5 and though most of the steps will be old news for some, there are a couple changes so be sure to review before proceeding with your Install/Upgrade projects. It does have a nice section on upgrading existing clusters as well.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about vMotion and bus-shared VMDKs. For the record, and from VMware, it is not recommended nor supported to vMotion your VM between ESX Hosts when using either Virtual or Physical mode bus-sharing.

I know there are plenty that will disagree and have found ways of doing it, but within our environments for our MSCS clusters using Physical mode, we disable DRS and only Cold vMotion once the resources of the cluster have been moved off the Node and the VM is Powered Off.